I was born in Shanghai, China. I grew up in the Bay Area attending public schools in Berkeley, Albany, and Lafayette. I am proud to be bilingual and bicultural, and for that I credit my mother, who raised me single-handedly while studying at UC Berkeley. In Chinese, I go by “Attorney Xinying” (欣颖律师).

I spent eight years on the East Coast, where I earned my undergraduate degree with high honors from Harvard University, worked as a community organizer, and then graduated with high honors from New York University School of Law. My law background is marked by a commitment to social justice and broad experience in federal and state court litigation, including complex class litigation, as well as counseling and representation of individuals facing hardships.

While at NYU, I trained in the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic, where I advocated for living wage legislation for domestic workers and represented an immigrant in federal deportation proceedings. As a volunteer for Law Students for Human Rights, I led a team of students in drafting an international law amicus brief in a Guantanamo detainee case. As a law student, I clerked at the Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center (now Legal Aid at Work) in San Francisco for its National Origin, Immigration, and Language Rights Program, and for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project in New York.

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I received training in federal court by clerking for a federal district judge in Los Angeles for two years and I learned state court practice when I represented low-income families as a staff attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid for three years. While at Bay Area Legal Aid, I represented tenants, homeowners and consumers and advocated for government policies and initiatives to help low-income communities suffering from the foreclosure crisis.

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Most recently, I worked for five years at Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP, a national public interest litigation firm. There, I represented blue-collar and white-collar workers, from immigrant low-wage workers to engineers to lawyers and executives, in discrimination, wage and hour, and whistleblower cases. I led hard-fought, cutting edge cases against large companies and coordinated teams of talented attorneys and legal assistants. I also worked for the San Francisco class action firm Ram Olson Cereghino & Kopczynski, representing consumers and journalists.

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In private practice, I am continuing my commitment to training junior attorneys, law students and legal assistants in public interest legal practice. I advise the national nonprofit civil rights organization, Equal Rights Advocates, as a member of the Litigation Committee, and am active in the California Employment Lawyers Association (CELA).

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I am also the proud mama of two small children who challenge me every day to be my very best.

Dominic grew up in Oakland, graduated from UC Davis with honors and earned his J.D. from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, where he was a member of the Hale Moot Court Honors team.

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Dominic began his career at the international law firm Dewey Ballantine (later Dewey & LeBoeuf) defending commercial and consumer cases. In 2009, Dominic returned home to the Bay Area and joined Gallo LLP, a litigation boutique focused on prosecuting consumer class and mass actions. Dominic was promoted to partner in 2012 and has played a key role in many of the firm’s significant cases, including Bottoni v. Sallie Mae, which eliminated an estimated $76 million in collection charges from the student loan obligations of some 40,000 Californians, a series of actions against for-profit culinary schools, which recovered tens of millions of dollars for students misled to believe they would become chefs, and various online privacy cases.

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In 2020, after ten successful years with Gallo LLP, Dominic proudly joined his wife Xinying at Valerian Law to continue fighting for justice for his clients.

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Dominic is admitted to practice in California and before the United States District Court for the Northern, Eastern, and Central Districts of California and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.